Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I agree with my colleague, Senator Darragh O'Brien, and others to an extent about the code of conduct on mortgage arrears applying to the loan books that will be sold. However, I have a concern, which I have mentioned on many occasions here, that the code of conduct is not worth the paper it is written on. In practice, organisations, particularly those that are withdrawing from the Irish market, are forcing borrowers into repossession or voluntary sale situations. I had a case yesterday in which a family farm of 100 acres, which had been in one family for generations and was probably worth in the region of €1 million, was being forced to be sold to repay borrowings of €480,000. That is fundamentally wrong. It is not necessary, but it is the quickest way for the bank, which is leaving the Irish market, to extract its funding from it. That is not the spirit in which the code of conduct was established. It is not the way business should be done. The fact is that the fox remains in charge of the henhouse. Is it any wonder that they would openly sign up to this?

In another case, in which I myself was the mediator between the borrower and a sub-prime lender, I went several times to the lender to ask for a mortgage-to-rent arrangement, which it trumpeted as a solution that it was offering to customers. They refused it and last week sent the papers for a voluntary sale, on which they insisted and which is not in the spirit of the code.

The reality is that the Government has washed its hands of this and the banks are in control, and now we are saying we will get the vulture funds to sign up to the code of conduct, which puts them in control anyway-----